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Demons
We publish a major new translation of DEMONS, one of DOSTOYEVSKY'S four great novels.
Partly based on the real-life case of a student murdered by his fellow revolutionaries, DEMONS is a powerful and prophetic, yet lively and often comic depiction of nineteenth-century Russia. It is also a fascinating exploration into the psyche of the 19th century terrorist, which is pertinent to the society we live in today.
Poems of John Milton
This year marks 400 years since the birth of John Milton. Milton was a master of almost every type of verse, from the classical to the religious and from the lyrical to the epic. Now CLAIRE TOMALIN, author of several highly acclaimed biographies, edits and introduces this new selection of Milton’s poems, in a hardback with beautiful cover design. DIVE INTO MILTON.
LOVE IS STRANGE, LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL, LOVE IS DANGEROUS
Love is never what you expect it to be. In a collection that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day, Penguin brings you the most seductive, inspiring and surprising writing on love in all its infinite variety, spanning over two thousand years and vastly different worlds, GREAT LOVES.
See the collection of twenty works and find out more about their beautifully designed covers HERE
Eileen Chang
'Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature'
Ang Lee
Known as "the Garbo of Chinese letters" for her elegance and the aura of mystery that surrounded her, Eileen Chang is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential modern Chinese novelists of the twentieth century. She was born in Shanghai in 1920. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1941 during the Japanese occupation, where she published two works, Romances and Written on Water, that established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to Hong Hong in 1952 and to the United States in 1955, where she continued to write. She died in Los Angeles in 1995.
We are delighted to be publishing Chang's work for the first time in the UK with two stunning collections of stories: LOVE IN A FALLEN CITY and LUST, CAUTION. The second one - an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II - is now a major film directed by Oscar-winning Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain) which will be shown in British cinemas from January 4th. Eileen Chang's novel Eighteen Springs will be published for the first time in English by Penguin Classics in 2009.
Read the TRANSLATOR'S AFTERWORD
Mariateresa Boffo,
Senior Commissioning Editor, Penguin Classics
Child of All Nations
The entire Penguin Classics team is incredibly excited to be publishing, for the first in English, Irmgard Keun’s utterly enchanting, little-known novel CHILD OF ALL NATIONS.
First published in German in 1938, it is the captivating story of a young girl, Kully, forced to travel around Europe with her exiled parents as Europe prepares for war. The story is told from young Kully's point of view, and her voice and the perspective of when it was written add poignancy to the story. Kully knows a lot of things, but there are still things she just doesn’t understand – like why there might soon be a war in Europe.
CHILD OF ALL NATIONS is sensitively translated by award-winning poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who made his name translating the works of Franz Kafka, Ernst Junger and Joseph Roth. And it is via Joseph Roth that Hofmann came to Keun and to this charming novel, as Keun was Roth's companion during his own exile in the 1930s. Keun then spent the war years living semi-legally in Germany and it was only late in her life and after her death in 1982that she was rediscovered in Germany. With this sparkling new translation Keun’s forgotten masterpiece is brought to a new generation of English readers for the very first time.
Anne Michaels, author of the acclaimed Fugitive Pieces, calls Kully’s voice 'hugely engaging' and says 'the book breathes compassion' and that the book has ‘room for everything – shrewdness, forgiveness, wit and loneliness – while love makes all its hopeless deals with hope’.
Adam Freudenheim
Penguin Classics Publisher
New Dante
This month, we’re delighted to be publishing the third volume in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Robert Kirkpatrick has translated the whole epic masterpiece, and you can see all three volumes here:
Inferno
Purgatorio
Paradiso
Joseph Conrad
It’s the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad’s birth this year, and to celebrate we are publishing stunning new editions of his work. The jackets are by Phil Hale, and really capture the heart of the matter. Our general editor for the series, John Stape, is publishing the definitive biography of Conrad in the next few months, something to look out for. All in all, this is a gem of a series.
Read Owen Knowles’s introduction to HEART OF DARKNESS and see all of our new editions HERE...
Boys Own Books
Do you long for the days of building camps at the bottom of the garden, and defending your territory from marauding invaders? Making mud pies with worm garnish to serve to your comrades? Building bridges across streams to explore unknown worlds? Then you’re ripe for our series of Dangerous Books, classic stories of derring do, boys’ own style. Start your adventure. HERE...
A Tranquil Star
Primo Levi died twenty years ago this year. And to commemorate his life and writing, we are publishing A Tranquil Star, the first publication in English of seventeen of his miraculous short stories. Levi was undoubtedly one of the literary masters of the age, and these stories show precisely why Calvino called him ‘one of the most important writers of our time’. HERE...
Geoff Dyer on James Salter
James Salter is one of the greatest American writers of the past fifty years, and he’s coming to Penguin Modern Classics! We’re overjoyed to be publishing his first novel The Hunters and his equally moving later novel Light Years. Light Years has a new introduction by another of the greats, Richard Ford. If you’ve never read Salter, now’s the time to dive in. You won’t regret it. Read Geoff Dyer on this extraordinary writer HERE...
Great Journeys
Following on from the success of our Great Ideas series, this month we publish Great Journeys, the perfect antidote to the winter blues. If the rain and dark is getting you down, escape from it all with the best of classic travel writing, including Twain, Thesiger, Kapuscinski and Shackleton. Your summer holiday planning starts HERE...
The Shooting Party
This month, we publish one of the most glittering and sparky modern novels for the first time in Modern Classics.
Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party was the inspiration for the Oscar-winning Gosford Park, one of Robert Altman’s last films. The screenplay of the film was written by Julian Fellowes, and he’s written an introduction to our edition. MORE ...
Tangled up in Blue
We have recently published the last two of our landmark new translations of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Interpreting Dreams and The Psychology of Love are cornerstones to understanding how our minds work and why we behave as we do.
Not only that: we have just published a new translation of Durkheim’s On Suicide, a bedfellow, as it were, for Freud. Durkheim recognized that, as well as being an intensely personal act, suicide has an important social dimension. Read the begining of Richard Sennett’s introduction, which explores how the issues remain significant in today’s society, especially in light of the increasing frequency of ‘aggressive suicide’ embodied by suicide bombers. MORE ...
Classic Camus
Fresh from being voted men's favourite author in the Independent, Albert Camus gets two fabulous new translations, Exile and the Kingdom and The Fall, and a cool new series look. MORE ...
Updike's Rabbit
John Updike joins Modern Classics this month. Here, the man himself talks about how he wrote his ‘Rabbit’ novels. MORE ...
Penguin Epics
The Epics depict the most extreme acts of heroism, ambition, bravery and violence, and in doing so they reveal mankind’s most profound aspirations and darkest fears. This month Philip Pullman celebrates the greatest stories ever told. MORE ...
Crossing to Safety
Novelist Jane Smiley introduces Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece about the lifelong struggle of two couples to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life. MORE ...
Rashomon
Scott Pack, Buying Manager at Waterstone’s, writes about his discovery of Akutagawa’s Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories. MORE ...
Ragtime
Al Alvarez introduces Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow’s Great American Novel. MORE ...
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